Lake District

Declared in 1951, it is the largest national park in England and since 2017 a UNESCO World Heritage Site as a cultural landscape, not merely a natural one: unlike continental parks, here villages, centuries-old farms and more than 15 million visitors a year share the ground with glacial lakes such as Windermere and Derwentwater. It was decisive in the birth of the British conservation movement: the Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge) idealised its landscapes in the early 19th century, and Beatrix Potter, author of Peter Rabbit, gave much of her land to the National Trust, laying the legal groundwork for its future protection.